Editorial and Contents

Ravenshaw Journal
of Literary
and Cultural Studies
Vol. V
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
RAVENSHAW UNIVERSITY
CUTTACK, ODISHA, INDIA
Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies (RJLCS)
EDITOR
Subhra Prakash Das
CO-EDITORS
Madhusmita Pati
Urmishree Bedamatta
EDITORIAL BOARD
Amulya Purohit
Former Professor (Emeritus)
Department of English
Utkal University
Thomas Kemple
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
University of British Columbia
Raj Kumar Himansu Mohapatra
Professor, Department of English Professor, Department of English
Delhi University Utkal University
John Cussen Kerstin Shands
Associate Professor Professor, Department of English
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Sodertorns University
R. Swarnalata David Dennen
Associate Professor Department of Music
IIT Madras University of California at Davis
Editorial Correspondence
Head, Department of English, Ravenshaw University
Cuttack - 753003, India.
E-mail: [email protected]
© 2015 Department of English, Ravenshaw University, Cuttack
Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies is published once a year, in January,
by the Department of English, Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, Odisha, India in
collaboration with the Ravenshaw English Alumni Association.
Included in the MLA index
Editorial
In this second decade of the twenty first century, after being
sufficiently armed with theories and 'after theories', after being led
from the centre to the peripheries, having taken enough cues from
men of varying ideologies about humans, animals and ecology,
marching backward, forward and again backward in histories,
navigating among the settlers and the diaspora, pronouncing authors
to be dead, we are asking for even more. Today's serious students of
literature are looking for, say, food culture in Othello, unthinkable
some thirty years ago. And yet Bradley remains the first point of
reference in any undergraduate class on Shakespeare.
Or, for that matter, Tagore will remain Tagore,
notwithstanding the plethora of translations of his 'classic' poems. In
a very interesting essay, "Translating Tagore's Poetry: A Territory of
Unending Differences", Fakrul Alam confirms that 'translation is
necessarily an act of interpretation' and at the same time it is 'an
enthralling experience into the territory of unending differences' as
he explores the translations of Tagore's song-lyrics by Radice, Winter
and the bard himself. He believes in the 'creativity' behind translating
a 'classic' poem and how various translations do and must vary from
each other. In passing, he also harps on Yeats's and Pound's
'denunciations' of the poems and yet believes that 'there will never be
a perfect definitive translation although [this] should not deter
anyone from attempting more versions of it in future'.
RJLCS 5 (2015)
Tagore's autobiography Jibansmriti (Life Memories) is the
subject of Nandini Bhattacharya's article "Life beckoning to life' Reading auto/biographies and Auto/biographies' Readers".
Bhattacharya also does an extensive reading of Plutarch's Lives,
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Mohandas Gandhi's
Autobiography: An Experiment with Truth and Barack Obama's The
Audacity of Hope. She begins by exploring how auto/biography is
peculiarly open ended and complete in its reading practice as the
'modern' and 'secular' reader consumes, partakes of and participates
in the culture-specific heroic subjectivity and assumes that ethicoheroic subjectivity through the very act of reading. In Part V of her
essay, she examines 'auto/biographies as veering towards and being
informed by an informed reader' and explores reading lists provided
by the auto/biographers to discover how they 'are influenced by their
reading of earlier life-narratives'.
Raj Kumar builds a powerful Dalit narrative in his essay,
"Dalits as 'the Others': Reading Dalit Discourse in Joseph Macwan's
Angaliyat". He first outlines the history of Dalit novel in India and
then focuses on Angaliyat, the first in this genre. In doing so, he
identifies caste as the 'real culprit' in Indian society and criticises
'emotionalistic' literature about Dalit characters written by upper
caste writers in early twentieth century, and joins the debate on who
is/can be a Dalit writer. He explores Angaliyat as a social document
and also as a political challenge to the upper / dominant caste.
In an interview with Bijender Singh, the famous Dalit writer
Basudev Sunani firmly defines Dalit literature as literature written by
Dalits about Dalits. It represents the sufferings of the Dalit society as
a whole while other literature is egocentric, although Dalit women
have not been sufficiently represented in Dalit literature which
should, however, be inclusive, speaking of all lower castes and help
develop a common identity. Sunani feels that Dalit literature need
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not be hostile, but be based on love and peace and collective welfare
of society, and not merely on pain, angst and anger.
Moving on to another area of marginalised society, Anjana
Raghavan scrutinises two novels - Valmiki's Daughter by Shami
Mootoo and The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet - and focuses
on Indo-Caribbean women's nuanced experiences of trauma,
violence, sexuality and solidarity. She contextualises how diasporas
always carry a sense of the nomadic and how the Indo-Caribbean
diaspora is 'an especially interesting site both because of its historical
positioning as well as its "racial" one'.
Baasma Parvi and Swarnalatha Rangarajan take us to the
world of Sufi poetry while they interpret the ecological vision in
Rumi's Masnavi in their article entitled "The Meaning of All Things:
The Green Hermeneutic of Rumi's Masnavi". Rumi shows how it is
'impossible to speak of the human or God without speaking of the
sentience of the earth, water and fire.' The authors argue that 'the
ecological Self is an enlarged notion of the Self wherein dualism
disappears and the sacred oneness or union, not only with the creator,
but also with the creation is realised'.
Krishanu Maiti picks up yet another strand in ecocritical
literature in "Speaking (of) Pig: Anthropomorphism as a Strategy in
Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig". In his analysis of the novel,
Krishanu encounters anthropomorphism as 'a representational device
and the extraordinary way in which certain narratives do give us the
ability to imagine not so much the non-human view of the world as
to see ourselves as animals and animals as ourselves'. He concludes
how anthropomorphism 'helps both to define and challenge our
perceptions of non-humans' and alerts us 'to those shared
characteristics that appear to bind the species together'.
Another article, "Power, Subjugation and Anthropocentrism in
Lois Lowry's The Giver" by Pooja A, studies the novel as a metaphor
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of anthropocentric domination of nature, resulting from the socially
constructed human call that sees subjugation of the other as
necessary and inevitable. The article engages with Foucault's theory
of how power operates in society and how what is not normative is
made normal through mechanisms of discipline. In the final section
she uncovers the covert anthropocentrism that marks subjugation of
nature, and concedes that in the nature/ culture dichotomy, which
itself is a construct, nature is relegated to margins, while culture is
upheld as a human domain.
If fiction and poetry come, can drama be far behind?
Urmishree Bedamatta has unearthed multilingual nuances and
multiple forms of verbalisation in Odia, Bengali and Perso-Arabic
languages employed in 18th-19th century Mughal tamsa enacted in
rural Odisha. She locates tamsa (literally meaning a folk theatrical
performance) as a socio-linguistic site of contest where locals (like
servants, milkmaid etc) deride the Mirza (a high powered but now
impotent official of the empire) who does not understand the
vernacular. The verbal bouts interestingly lead to peals of laughter
among the audience. She laments how Mughal tamsa, being polyglot,
failed to continue during the colonial period when language mixing
was not considered a positive act of language use or as a creative act
by bhadralok.
Avishek Sarkar's paper, "Diasporic Inflections: The Yiddish
Shylock in America", examines an 'interesting portrayal of Shylock
in the American Yiddish theatre with reference to the evolution of
diasporic attitudes within the community'. He illustrates the 'rich
complexity of diasporic experience' while considering the case of
Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman as a 'crypto-Jew' and Shylock
of The Merchant of Venice as 'a more restrictive and forbidding case
of marginalisation'.
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The Book Review section features John Cussen's article,
"Generational Consciousness: Three Recent Korean American
Fiction". Cussen reviews Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung,
Drifting House by Krys Lee and The Collective by Don Lee. He
explores how 'as much as to whom one is born and where, one's
vision of reality is shaped by when one enters the world'. All three
Korean writers acknowledge how one's own generational experience
matters not only to one's self, but also to future generations.
I am delighted that in the present volume of RJLCS we get to
see literature in all its colours. The rishi asked the river, "Oh, River,
why do you flow for ever so silently?" The River smiled and replied,
"I flow for you and rest of the world." This small episode (in The
Vedas) should gently remind us that Literature, like the River, does
flow across continents.
Subhra Prakash Das
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Contents
Translating Tagore’s poetry: A Territory of Unending
Differences
Fakrul Alam
1
‘Life beckoning to life’ - Reading Auto/biographies and Auto/
biographies' Readers
22
Nandini Bhattacharya
Dalits as ‘the Others’: Reading Dalit Discourse in Joseph
Macwan’s Angaliyat
Raj Kumar
46
‘Dalit Iconography is the Need of the Hour’: An Interview with
Basudev Sunani
73
Bijender Singh
Gendered Cosmopolitan Solidarities in Indo-Caribbean
Women’s Narratives
Anjana Raghavan
79
‘The Meaning of All Things’: The Green Hermeneutic of
Rumi’s Masnavi
Baasma Parvi & Swarnalatha Rangarajan
100
Speaking (of) Pig: Anthropomorphism as a Strategy in Dick
King-Smith’s The Sheep-Pig
118
Krishanu Maiti
Power, Subjugation, and Anthropocentrism in Lois Lowry’s
The Giver
Pooja A
129
Language mix, ‘low forms’ and Canonical Exclusion: The Lost
Case of Mogul Tamsa
146
Urmishree Bedamatta
Diasporic Inflections: The Yiddish Shylock in America
Abhishek Sarkar
165
Generational Consciousness: Three Recent Korean American
Fictions
183
John Cussen
About the Authors
193